It is common practice to deploy first responders to a remote location in response to an emergency or incident. In recent years, such incidents have included natural disasters, peace keeping missions, attacks by terrorists and deployments in support of the global war on terrorism. A common problem among first responders is to capture accurate and current information to the command center and then provide such accurate and current information to the responder on the ground responding to the incident.
Incident commanders require numerous tools to assist them with managing an incident. Effective incident command is critical to both effective firefighting and the safety of personnel who work in any hazardous environment. Incident Command tracks firefighters and EMS personnel working at inherently chaotic emergency incidents. Fire ground commanders communicate strategy and track their resources typically with a manual magnetic board. Although, laptop computers, software applications, wireless data and voice communications technologies are utilized, such resources are typically implemented in stand alone systems and information from such systems are then communicated to the incident command cell and tracked using the manual magnetic board.